Monday, 3 July 2017

In my spare time, I am slowly learning Bach’s English Suite
in A minor, movement by movement. I take
a break from writing or studying and I sit down at the piano, pick a small
section, and work through it, trying to get it under my fingers. I always make progress throughout a practice
session, and leave the piano feeling like I’ve accomplished some learning. But the next day, when I come back to the
piano, and try the same section, I’m usually disappointed. The improvements from the previous day don’t
seem to last in the same way they did when I was a younger musician.Unfortunately, this is a natural effect of aging.

Memory and learning differ between young adults and older
adults in a number of ways. Older adults tend to have more difficulty with
declarative memory – conscious memory for facts and events – than younger
adults. This is often attributed to
age-related loss of neurons in the hippocampus, a structure in the brain that
is the site of declarative memory formation. So if I tell you that Ulaan Baatar is the capital of Mongolia, you would store
that in your declarative memory. If
you’re twenty, you are more likely to remember this fact tomorrow than if you are
seventy. From a psychological point of view, deficits in declarative memory
seem to be related to decreased attentional resources in older people. In other
words, older people can’t pay attention to as many different things at once as
a younger person can, so they can’t spend as much time committing any one fact
to memory. That means the capital of Mongolia won’t be stored in their memory as stably as it would in a young
person.

Motor learning uses a different type of memory known as
procedural memory, and has its own difficulties for older adults. Older people are able to improve at a new
skill over a practice session, but they show a different pattern from young
people when it comes to retaining that skill. When young research volunteers learn a new motor skill, such as a
finger-tapping pattern, they improve significantly over a practice period, with
a decrease in the number of errors and a gradual increase in speed. When the volunteers come back the next day
for a second session, their performance often has improved overnight, without
any further practice. This is due to sleep-dependent consolidation, in which our motor skills both improve and become resistant to interference
from other memories, while we’re sleeping. People can literally improve their motor skills, such as playing a musical
instrument, just by sleeping.

As we age, things start to change. Older adults just don’t show the same
between-sessions improvement in motor skills, and in fact their performance on
the second day of training on a task starts out much lower than where they left
off the day before, just like when I practice Bach. When researchers compared
the brainwaves of sleeping young adults with sleeping older adults, it became
clear that older adults spend less time in slow-wave sleep and show a decrease
in sleep spindles, a particular type of brainwave that is believed to be
important in motor memory consolidation.

Research from the University of Montreal suggests that the hippocampus, even though its main role is in declarative memory, is important
for sleep-dependent consolidation of motor memory. This implies that decreased hippocampal
function in aging leads to problems with motor memory consolidation. The key point here is that there are important
interactions between the declarative and procedural memory systems. Which means that the
declines in declarative memory which happen naturally with age also affect
procedural memory.

Understanding this gives us a hint at a solution to the
problem of motor learning in older adults. One of the ways in which we learn motor skills is by using declarative
memory to help us along the way. For
example, when we’re learning a new piece of music, we consciously read the
music and try to be aware of things we need to remember: cross finger 4 over here; F# in left hand
here, and so on. Using declarative memory to bolster motor learning is a poor strategy when declarative
memory isn’t working so well. In order
to counteract the effects of poor declarative memory on motor learning, we
should choose practicing strategies that rely more on implicit, procedural
memory, strategies based on repetition of the movements we want to
learn rather than our cognitive appraisal of the notes and movements required
to make them.

The obvious candidate for this type of learning is a
technique called errorless learning. This technique suggests that if you can
simplify a task somehow so that it can be practiced without making errors (or
at least as few as possible), then you engage procedural memory systems,
leading to more automatic performance. For example, a 2012 study by Chauvel and colleagues tested older and
younger adults in two techniques to learn golf putting skills. One group used “infrequent error” learning,
where the people practiced putting into a hole from a short distance away. The other group practiced putting from a
larger distance, while led to more frequent errors because the task was
harder. This second group had to develop
declarative strategies about how to improve. Then both groups were tested on putting from an intermediate distance,
with and without distractions. The
researchers wanted to see if the older adults fared better with one type of
learning than the other. And the results
were clear: when using the “infrequent
error” approach, older and younger adults performed equally well on the
test. Using the “frequent error”
approach older adults performed worse than younger adults.

In music practice, errorless practice can be achieved by
practicing at a slow enough tempo to avoid mistakes in pitch and rhythm. I’ve adopted this approach recently, playing
everything extremely slowly and accurately and I found that it improved my
retention of the pieces both within and between practice sessions.

Of course, the idea of practicing slowly is not new or
mind-shattering. I often tell my
students that if they’re practicing their pieces so quickly that they’re making
mistakes, then they’re actually practicing their mistakes. But since reading about errorless learning,
I’ve been encouraging them more and more to practice error-prone sections using
“slow-motion” practice, and this has been very helpful for them. It’s revealing to see the reasoning behind
why this works: because errorless practicing
is training our procedural, automatic memory.

While my sense of
pride wants me to point out that I don't actually fall into the
category of "older adult", I'm not as young as I used to be, and clearly
that makes a difference in how my memory processes function. As in the story of the tortoise and the hare,
slow and steady wins the race, especially if you're no spring chicken. References

About Me

Tara Gaertner is a neuroscientist, music educator, writer and speaker. She holds a Bachelor’s degree in Music from McGill University and a Ph.D. in Neuroscience from the University of Texas, Houston. She has taught piano, flute, and music theory since 1988 and currently teaches the Music for Young Children program as well as private piano and flute lessons. She is an Adjunct Professor at the University of British Columbia, lecturing on Neuroscience in the department of Occupational Science and Occupational Therapy.